ABOUT SOUND LEVLE TESTING

Sound level meters are commonly used in noise pollution studies for the quantification of different kinds of noise, especially for industrial, environmental, mining and aircraft noise. The current international standard that specifies sound level meter functionality and performances is the IEC 61672-1:2013. However, the reading from a sound level meter does not correlate well to human-perceived loudness, which is better measured by a loudness meter. Specific loudness is a compressive nonlinearity and varies at certain levels and at certain frequencies. These metrics can also be calculated in a number of different ways.

The world's first hand-held and transistorized sound level meter, was released in 1960 and developed by Brüel & Kjær. In 1980, Cirrus Research introduced the world's first handheld integrating sound level meter to provide Leq and SEL measurements